In simpler times when the worst war criminal pinching cocktail-waitress behind was "Hank" Kissinger, the story would have ended with a payoff to a cheeky madame and maybe some free plane tickets to Pinochet's Chile for a whirlwind vacation...that said madame would never come back from.

Not so today.  "Swingin' Dick" Cheney owns this here land as outright as Pinochet owned Chile; that means nobody threatens the Swingin' Dick.  Times like these call for the exercise of pure power, a demonstration of the raw exercise of political muscle: you get someone else to humiliate your opponent.

So what happened to Wayne?

Wayne got the TSA-goose at Reagan International on his way to Houston.  In front of his lady-friend...who also received some untoward attention from these crack Homeland Security troops designed to intimidate and frighten so that you won't bother with flying in the first place.

So Wayne Madsen had his papers and his person violated in a manner that would have made our Founding Fathers cringe.  Violations of the First and Fourth Amendments, for starters, by folks employed by one of the most despicable war criminals of the modern era. 

Did you film it for later enjoyment, Dickey?  Enjoy your time on the planet, by all means.  Get your rocks off.  There's no such thing as God or karma, and certainly the Hague is a just a quaint monument to the futility of trying to quash fascism in the first place.

If Wayne Madsen is guilty of anything, it's drinking too much and getting stupid-angry.  He is a military and intelligence veteran, two things that Cheney conspicuously avoided during his meteoric rise in the Nixon and Ford Whitehouses.  I'd say he's entitled to be ticked off at this Whitehouse.

My problem with this White House, from the beginning as now, is that their whole zeitgeist involves the destruction of everything the heroes of Normandy -- hell, the heroes of Leningrad -- spilled hundreds of thousands of gallons of blood to secure for the rest of the world.

120 US veterans per week have been, and are, commiting suicide,

boys 'n girls, because they KNOW what they experienced and they now know that it was for nothing.  They knew their charge and they kept it, faithfully.  Until the Reagan Administration -- which was really the first Bush Administration since everyone on the inside knew that Ronny had Alzheimer's LONG before Hinckley was setup to shoot Ronny in the chest -- the United States of America treated its veterans, treated its citizens, with respect, honesty and decency. 

No more.  Within the first 100 days of the Reagan Administration, the long-term mentally ill were turned loose on society.  Paranoid schizophrenics who could not be trusted to take their medications were walking the streets, talking to themselves and scaring the B. Jesus out of people who hadn't seen this kind of lunacy in 100 years.  Roll back FDR?  Try rolling back Dorothea Dix and going back to the days when the SPCA were the first responders for the mentally ill.

And, today, May 12, 2008, Wayne Madsen and his travelling companion had their luggage searched to a depth most of us may never experience, and had his crotch felt up by some poor bastard who couldn't get a better job in this economic environment.  All because Dick Cheney "could" pick up a telephone and put the squeeze on a veteran intelligence officer of the United States military.

Why we did not start charging barricades 20 years ago I do not know.  But I do know that the unAmerican, treasonous bastards in charge now started down this path with Project Paperclip and the importation of Nazis who should have been hung at Nuremberg, but, instead had their work on human subjects legitimized by the nation that built their empire in the first place. 

That nation would be the United States of America.  Land of the Affordable.  Home to the Naive.